what a strange fucking day.
asthma attacks are brutal. just yesterday, I wrote “i cheated last night and had a cigarette & spent the day wheezing.” unfortunately, I exacerbated that by moving books around and kicking up dust, and I couldn’t catch my breath enough to fall asleep. this winter, I’ve usually been able to keep the attacks at bay by relaxing my body and using mentholated gel on my body to relax my lungs, but it was rolling around to 1:30 and nothing was working. I hopped into the shower because sometimes the humid hot air helps, and I saw myself in the mirror and realized how terrible i looked. like someone in distress. i decided that i needed to go and see someone as soon as possible, so i made an appointment with zoomcare. i also decided to swallow my pride and steal some of my roommate’s medicine so that I could get sleep for a couple of hours before I went in.
in the morning, i was able to see the nurse practitioner fairly quickly. one of the reasons i avoided getting help was because i dreaded the idea of being ashamed to tell them that I smoked, but it turns out that its pretty shameful to explain to a medical professional why you didn’t get help when your are clearly sick. i explained that I had had inhalers in the past, and I needed a new scrip for one. she listened to my lungs and was like,

yeah… you should get an inhaler, but you also have fluid in your lungs. you’ve been walking around with pneumonia.
inside my head I’m like:

because my cough was actually much better until very recently, and if I have a lung infection right now, I’ve probably had it since september.
i braved the obnoxious bore that is filling a prescription, and took the first doses and immediately felt a lot better from the steroids. i was glad to have insurance with drug benefits, but it was a lot more expensive than I wanted it to be (here’s some terrible shit about the shittiness of drug companies vis a vis asthma) I called in sick to work because at this point i was just feeling like shit and hadn’t gotten more than a couple hours of sleep. Lauren was off of work and I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days, so it was nice to have a little BestieTalk™ for a couple hours before we both slept.
felt much better when I woke up. talked a little bit with my family. cleaned the kitchen. ready to feel better.
i have a lot of complex thoughts about what it means to be so careless with myself as to avoid treatment for something fairly substantial. I think my own emotional sense of risk and reward is broken, and i feel bad at how sad it is to live as a person that avoids asking for help or addressing issues because there’s a chance that it might become worse, and that clings to the misery of the present because it’s a known quantity. i’ve got one of my last sessions with my amazing therapist tomorrow, so i think that’s what I’d like to talk about.